Maurice Quinlivan (Limerick City, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I raise the issue of University Hospital Limerick. Unfortunately, I feel myself having to raise it almost every week. Today there are 100 people on trolleys in our hospital; yesterday there were 105. There have been 915 already in the month of May, a higher number than for any month previously. It is an ongoing crisis. University Hospital Limerick has 530 inpatient beds, with 76,473 presentations to the emergency department in 2021. Compared with St. James's Hospital, which has 698 such beds, with an emergency department attendance of 48,397, that is where the Government's problem is. The only plan the Government has is to deliver a 96-bed unit in about three years' time. The Government and the Minister have confirmed that, of those 96 beds, 48 will be new beds. I want to know what the Government will do now because we cannot go on with a situation in which there are 100 people or more on trolleys in the hospital every single day.

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